I think it depends on the person and where they are at. I know people that the last thing they need to do is keep going loud. However when I met you, your single biggest problem was you were used to singing very quietly and disconnected, and all your attempts to raise the volume just choked you. So I focused on getting you to sing loud first with good support. The sensation of support is very obvious on a loud tone and you can begin to grow your voice pretty quickly with it. Once your chest grows strong I would have you start working on keeping the tone connected and relaxed (mixed voice).

Of course you can go lighter earlier but if you were to do so, your post would instead be about "how do I get a more powerful voice?"

In answer to your question, I've found for people like you, growing chest strong first is necessary because starting on the whisper volume then trying to go louder and louder tends to just never happen. Because going louder strains you because theres no support to take off the pressure off the throat. The support is easier to feel when you go louder, but starting too light can encourage a disconnection from the body.

here are some other things and why I like to keep the chest strong:
- when singing loud, all the sensations of support and vowel modification are obvious, and when you sing lighter these things must still be there but they will be more subtle. Because they are subtle many people just don't do them and wonder why they keep flipping to falsetto.
- If you haven't grown your chest voice, and you are flipping into falsetto at D4, then staying light won't help. You need to go louder so that the break moves up more to the F4 then release it into the mix. Then I advise for someone like you to grow the chest so that break moves up to the A4 then you release to mix. Then finally the C5 then release to mix. Doing this takes anywhere from 6 months to 1 year to develop depending on where you are at when you start. This is your "call" or "belt" mechanism. Once you can take your chest up to the A4-C5 area then "bridge" and keep going up to F5 or whatever then I think you have all you need to lighten it up and never have to really ask for more power. This doesn't mean you have to wait a year to start singing light. But it means your focus is on the things I just said, and you also on the side can dabble with going lighter. I like to build multiple things at once not just one thing.

When we were training though your biggest thing you needed was to build that strong chest voice first.
- Having said all this many simply choose to take their voice to F4 then release (when I say releaes, it is mixed voice not falsetto) it and it suits their music. You can stop it there, but it won't suit the style of music you are after, and you'll find that if you wanna belt strongly, it won't be happening because your B4's will be very light.
- Building the ability to still go into mixed voice on a loud volume will really give you the foundation and strong tower, you will find the voice is more consistent. The people I know that always release earlier always tend to complain to me about their E-F4 area. They can get through it but sometimes it can cause trouble if they aren't warmed up. Well I found that if you grow your chest strong, that struggling point will shift up higher so you have a wider range before you even have to deal with any sort of break.
- Once you can sing loudly like this you will find an easier time lightening up the sound but it still needs to be trained in specifically to help you find the coordination, and your personality is what is going to dictate what you have trouble with. For your personality, you probably will lighten up the sound no problem but may habitually begin to have problems with your powerful notes as your personality tends to want to "let everything go" and start singing from the throat again.
Dan's video is good with that mezza di voce kind of thing. But I have to say many people can't do those things until AFTER they've been using their voice strongly for awhile.

I think what will really help you if you wanna find the lighter coordinations is using the SS exercises you did whe you started HOWEVER, using them on the louder volume that you have been training in recently. If you do this, set a volume, don't deviate from it and just let hte consonant take you into the thinner sound, you will find what you are looking for. doing it too quietly will tend to put you into falsetto. Hope this helps.

Ugi said

My question is: How exactly does this "transition" from being able to sing medium/loud to singing light happen? Because when I practice my chesty full exercises I have trouble doing the open "ah" (for example) on a lighter level. From my limited understand, singing loud requires the cords to open more than singing lightly, is that right?

Ok, Phil has given you a pretty good response. I was in the same boat as you when I started. I'm a little bit different than Dan because I naturally tended towards singing really lightly when I first got into singing, so it was hard for me to find volume or belt or even find my chest voice! I had to go through a process of learning to find my chest voice and then take it up for a while. In that time period, you will be loud. The voice will be free, but just loud. Then as time goes on, you work towards backing off of that volume without losing the breath support. That's the tricky part about it and why it's done in stages.

There are lots of exercises for this. Once you've developed your loud chest voice up to say the G4 or so, then what you can do to begin training dynamics is take something like the SLS long scale, and think you're going to do it at your regular loud volume, except on the top two notes, think slightly less loud. This will help you gradually decrease the intensity.

Another exercise my teacher had me do is to sing a regular 5-tone scale. Start off doing it at a comfortable loud volume first. Then sing it again, but this time trying to go slightly less loud. (Don't think soft, think less loud!) Then you sing the same scale again and try it slightly less loud. And you keep repeating that until you find the softest you can go without disconnecting and/or constricting. Then you move the exercise up a half step and repeat again. This is similar to the idea Daniel mentioned about singing as if a baby is asleep in the room. My teacher used to tell me the same thing, difference was, at the time she told it to me, my chest voice was so underdeveloped that it wouldn't work -- I would just automatically go to falsetto! It helped to get my falsetto really controlled, but didn't do much for my full voice.

Now, here's another hint. Open vowels are THE HARDEST to keep controlled when trying to do softer volumes! So vowels like AH, AA, and EH will be really hard! Don't start with them because they will give you a headache! Instead, start with closed vowels -- vowels like OO, closed OH (something between OH and OO), EE, and closed AY (something between AY and EE). These vowels make it much easier to control dynamics. They help you to discover the feeling you are looking for in the body. Once you find the balance you are looking for on these closed vowels, then try to find that same sensation on open vowels.

I will add lastly that this is a process that takes time. It will develop in layers. So this month, you may find you can only back off to a certain degree without losing control. As you keep practicing, then next month you see you can back off even more, and it gets easier. Then a few months later, you can back off a lot, almost bordering on falsetto but without totally disconnecting -- it will confuse you because you'll wonder why you couldn't achieve it the first time around when you tried it. This is how the normal progression looks.